Smelting plant upholds eco-friendly operations

SAN SIMON -- The Real Steel Corporation (RSC), a smelting plant located along Quezon Road here, on Monday, November 20, assured the public that its daily operations is anchored on all the environmental laws imposed by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).

This was amid the accusations hurled at RSC, along with four more steel mills in Pampanga, Metro Manila and Davao, by an environmental group, which alleged that the plants are violating various environmental laws.

Environmentalist group Clean Air Philippines Movement, Inc. (CAPMI) in a report identified the other steel plants as Melter’s Steel Corporation and Wan Chiong Steel Corporation, both from this town, Davao Mighty Steel Corporation in Davao, and Metro Dragon Steel Corporation in Caloocan City.

The said steel mills were allegedly violating the Philippine Clean Air Act including the Environmental Compliance Certificate and Environmental Impact Assessment Law, as well as laws on occupational safety and health hazards and other pertinent labor laws, the report further stated.

However, Real Steel Corporation Control Officer Cyril Angelica Hilario belied all accusations, saying the smelting plant management makes efforts to comply with the applicable rules and regulations to ensure that their operations are anti-pollution and environmental friendly.

“These claims are very far from truth. Our products undergo comprehensive testing and careful selection in order to ensure that we only produce high quality steel in accordance with the Philippine standards. As a matter of fact, Real Steel Corporation is one of the very few industrial companies issued a permit to operate after successfully passing the strict and rigorous tests conducted by the DENR,” she stressed.

Hilario also belied the environmentalists group’s statement saying induction furnace results, a technology used in melting steel is bad, inefficient and is hurting the environment.

“We discovered that most of these industrial smelting plants and factories are using a bad technology imported from China in melting scrap metals. This bad technology called induction furnace results in an inefficient and incomplete combustion of recycled or scrap metal materials [used as materials in steel production]leading to massive and fatal air pollution production including toxic chemical emissions inside and outside these steel plants or mills,” the group said in a statement.

Hilario said that contrary to such claims, induction is considered a more efficient, controllable and cleaner alternative process for melting metals.

“We have conducted thorough studies before implementing this process and we have data to back up our statement,” she asserted.

Aside from these, Hilario also underscored that Real Steel Corporation is the only smelting plant in the country that has stand-by units of air pollution devices which serve as filters to ensure that no polluted air will come out of the environment.